Obama’s European History Lesson

It’s easy to be skeptical about Presidential speeches. Some political scientists and media commentators believe that, in terms of shifting public opinion, they matter barely at all, and in many instances there is something to this view. Once in a while, though, especially when a President is travelling abroad as the leader of the West, it is incumbent upon him to stand up and say something meaningful.

In Cairo, in May, 2009, President Obama managed to do that, delivering a memorable address that upheld democratic values and squarely confronted the battered image of the United States in the Muslim world. Five months later, upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Stockholm, Obama gave another weighty talk, in which, among other things, he defended the concept of a just war. Since then, Obama’s overseas speeches have been less consequential, partly reflecting his decision to step back and husband America’s power. (A cynic might say that if you don’t do very much, there isn’t a lot to explain or defend.)

Russia’s annexation of Crimea has changed things. Last week, Vladimir Putin stood up in the Kremlin and claimed that Russia’s actions were justified by the history of Crimea and by two decades of Western efforts to humiliate and dismember the Russian motherland. A cogent response was called for, and on Wednesday, at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, in Brussels, Obama delivered one. He challenged Putin’s narrative, accused Russia of violating international law and running “roughshod over its neighbors,” reaffirmed the U.S.’s support for the new government in Ukraine, reassured the nervous Baltic States that NATO would protect them, called on Western European countries to meet their NATO obligation, and wrapped it all up in a history lesson about why close coöperation between the United States and Europe remains vital. Russia’s action’s “must be met with condemnation, not because we’re trying to keep Russia down,” Obama said, “but because the principles that have meant so much to Europe and the world must be lifted up.”

It was an impressive speech. But it ended by raising a question that demands a more fully developed answer: “What kind of Europe … will we leave behind?” Will it be a Europe “whole and free”—the words used by President George H. W. Bush in Mainz, West Germany, in May, 1989—or will it be a Europe that excludes Russia, and is divided along a north-south frontier from the eastern border of Finland to the Black Sea?

Obama began by acknowledging the historic truth that what we often refer to as “American values” were forged in the European enlightenment and the European revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then he reminded his audience how the United States and Europe came together after the Second World War to defend “a shared vision of Europe, a vision based on representative democracy, individual rights, and a belief that nations can meet the interests of their citizens through trade and open markets, a social safety net, respect for those of different faiths and backgrounds.” The West had won the Cold War not “by tanks or missiles,” he said,

but because our ideals stirred the hearts of Hungarians, who sparked a revolution; Poles in their shipyards, who stood in solidarity; Czechs, who waged a Velvet Revolution without firing a shot; and East Berliners, who marched past the guards and finally tore down that wall.

If Mikhail Gorbachev had been in attendance, he might have asked, “What about me?” (If Jeane Kirkpatrick had been there, she would have said, “What about Reagan?”) But Obama’s purpose wasn’t to parse the historical record; it was to portray the Ukrainian demonstrators at the Maidan as the heirs to the Poles and the Czechs, and to contest the idea, generated by Putin and his supporters, that “America is somehow conspiring with fascists inside of Ukraine but failing to respect the Russian people.” The Ukrainians themselves “rejected a government that was stealing from the people instead of serving them, and are reaching for the same ideals that allow us to be here today,” Obama said. Russia’s efforts at obfuscation couldn’t disguise that it was “challenging truths that only a few weeks ago seemed self-evident, that in the twenty-first century the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters, that people and nations can make their own decisions about their future.”

To be sure, Putin and his supporters will dismiss this sort of stuff as the usual American twaddle, wrapping up hegemonic designs and strategic self-interest in the language of Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Nevertheless, it needed saying, and Obama did it well, even publicly acknowledging the fact that America’s recent history in Iraq makes him something of a problematic messenger. (“We did not claim or annex Iraq’s territory,” he said, sounding a bit like George W. Bush. “Instead, we ended our war and left Iraq to its people in a fully sovereign Iraqi state that can make decisions about its own future.”)

So where did the speech leave us?

With a standoff. Obama acknowledged that there is no prospect of Russia letting Crimea go, and no possibility of the West taking military action to force such an outcome—or even to protect eastern Ukraine from another Russian incursion. (Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO.) The game is to persuade Putin that the political and economic costs of sending his troops across the border outweigh the gains. So far, this appears to be working. On Tuesday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, at a meeting in the Hague with his Ukrainian counterpart, Andrii Deshchytsia, said that Russia has no intention of taking further military action.

That isn’t a long-term solution, though—not for Ukraine or for Europe at large. Obama was surely right to say that this isn’t a new Cold War. “Unlike the Soviet Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology,” he pointed out. But what is it, then?

Right now, it appears to be the dismal possibility of a permanently divided continent, with, on one side of the military divide, the European Union, sheltering under the NATO umbrella, and on the other a restless, excluded, and nuclear-armed Russia. If the “European question” is ever to be truly settled, that can’t be all there is to it. Containing Putin, while providing him with the option of a diplomatic off-ramp from his current course, is the right thing to do. But it isn’t enough. If Europe is ever to be “whole and free,” then Obama needs to hold out at least the distant prospect that Russia will be able to join the rest of the continent, not as an awkward neighbor but as a welcome partner.